How the 21 st Century Cures Act Can Mitigate the Ever Growing Problem of Mass Incarceration

By the time this article is published, our collective memory of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida could have faded or, even worse, been superseded by another mass shooting. Although details are still sparse, the perpetrator appears to be a 19-year-old man with a well-documented history of behavior disturbing enough to invoke referrals to mental health treatment, but not so disturbing as to warrant either commitment or even arrest. Unfortunately, the picture presented is one most familiar in the public imagination of how people with mental illness interact with the criminal justice system. In actuality, the violence of the perpetrator's crime makes him very untypical of the vast majority of people with mental illness who are no more likely to be violent than any other member of the general public. This Article will first describe the current situation in which people with mental illness have become part of the growing mass incarceration problem in the United States.